Monday, 14 March 2011

Fantasy as Metaphor

I like fantasy, as a reader it's what interests me, as an amateur/wannabe writer it's what inspires me. I mean it's not as if I won't read anything else, I also like detective novels and I read a lot of non-fiction, and it's not as if I won't write anything else either, but fantasy is my go to genre, my favourite. I really shouldn't have to defend that, but I keep running into people who look down on fantasy because it's 'just for kids', or even more annoyingly it's just for kids unless it's based very closely on an ancient story or preferably a legend in which case it counts as literature. That weird scrunching noise you can hear? that's my teeth grinding together.

I should probably point out that I've got nothing against stories being based specifically based on other stories, 'Lenore's Song' by Yunyu is a response to Poe's 'The Raven' and is awesome (and yes, literally a song, but that's not the point), Neil Gaiman's 'Snow, Glass, Apples.' is a retelling of the Snow White fairy tale and I love it. Done well the whole retelling / literary response thing is great, what gets on my nerves is the idea that a work is somehow better because it's a response to something else, or rather the inverse of that, that a fantasy work is automatically shallow and 'just for kids' if it isn't a response to something that has a literary pedigree. I won't even get into the issue of assuming that kids don't want any depth to their stories, that's a whole other rant for another day.

Now obviously I can't just say 'fantasy is for grown ups too, so there' because, well, I'm neither a five year old nor an American politician; and I can't really just point to the growing number of modern fantasy works that feature sex and violence (or come to that all the fairy tales that do in their unexpurgated forms), because I haven't been a teenager for a while and don't equate those things to maturity; not suitable for young children, sure, but that's not the same as 'grown up' now is it? What I'm going to do instead is point out the power of fantasy as a metaphor for real life.

Metaphor might actually be the wrong term, I think what I'm really talking about is abstraction, about fantasy as a gedanken or thought experiment for social thinking. The example that really springs to mind as example of this is Thud! by Terry Pratchett which if you haven't read it (and why the hell not? get thee to a bookstore dammit) has as a major theme racial intolerance between dwarfs and trolls or, in a more abstract sense, racial intolerance in general. Of course it would be perfectly possible to examine that theme in almost any other genre, but a non-fantasy setting would have to rely on real racial groups and all the reader expectations and lets be honest, reader prejudices, that go with that. True there are certain reader expectations in the realm of fantasy too, werewolves vs vampires is becoming a chronic cliche, elves vs dwarves* is pretty much expected as well, the difference is that as a fantasy writer you're allowed to throw those expectations in the bin and say 'but in my setting it's like this', doing that with real group would... cause issues.

So why is that important? Why do I think fantasy is so effective for examining issues rooted in real life? Well because it allows a fantasy author to examine an issue shorn of all the surrounding complications that could otherwise obscure their point; to me, it's the equivalent of a physicist simplifying a calculation by assuming a surface is frictionless or a mathematician talking about probabilities involving 'fair' coins or dice. In short it's a way of thinking about real problems without getting bogged down in the details.

Of course not all fantasy fiction is metaphorical in this sense, and frankly, nor should it be, pure escapism has value in and of itself; nor is fantasy that does examine issues metaphorically necessarily any good, in fact if it's metaphor first and story second it probably won't be, I'm just arguing that fantasy is as much capable of having intellectual depth as any other genre, possibly more so.

* if you're paying attention you'll realise I've used two different pluralisations of dwarf in the same post, that's because Pratchett spells it 'dwarfs' but Tolkien (where the 'elves vs' seems mostly to come from) spells it 'dwarves'. This probably says things about me that I'd rather you didn't examine too closely... please move along now.